On James Baldwin

The following was originally given as a talk at Town Hall in New York City in February to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of The New York Review. A recording of the talk is available on the 50 Years blog, along with links to the articles that Darryl Pinckney discusses.

I had no idea why I was so absorbed in James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, but everyone else in the car knew. My father had been driving for so long he gripped the wheel with paper towels. It was 1967 and we were days from Indianapolis on our way to Disney Land. We were actually on Route 66 and I didn’t care. I was thirteen years old and I wasn’t causing trouble, sitting between my two sisters with Baldwin’s novel about a man’s love for another man in my face. I remember my mother glancing back at me. We’d driven through a dust storm a while ago, but I’d missed it.

Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth’s witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of his voice and tricks of his speech will nearly burst my ears, when his smell will overpower my nostrils. Sometimes, in the days which are coming—God grant me the grace to live them—in the glare of the grey morning, sour-mouthed, eyelids raw and red, hair tangled and damp from my stormy sleep, facing, over coffee and cigarette smoke, last night’s impenetrable, meaningless boy who will shortly rise and vanish like the smoke, I will see Giovanni again, as he was that night, so vivid, so winning, all of the light of that gloomy tunnel trapped around his head.

Soon enough I had Another Country, Baldwin’s best seller, stashed away with what I considered porn. I’d not read his essays, because I knew that they were about race, a matter I was determined to put off for as long as I could. But the subject of race would not wait and in 1971 a teacher who understood showed me Baldwin’s “Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis” in The New York Review of Books. “The enormous revolution in black consciousness that has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America.” I come from preachers. I recognized that speaker.

Away and on my own at last, drinking and cruising, I read in my dorm room what I’d refused to at home. I fell under the spell of Baldwin’s voice. No other black writer I’d read was as literary as Baldwin in his early essays, not even Ralph Ellison. There is something wild in the beauty of Baldwin’s sentences and the cool of his tone, something improbable, too, this meeting of Henry James, the Bible, and Harlem. I can see the scratches in the desk in my room where I was reading “Notes of a Native Son,” Baldwin’s memoir of his hated father’s death the day his father’s last child was born in 1943, one day before Harlem erupted into the deadliest race riot in its history. I can feel the effects of this essay within me still.

However, there was a problem as new…

This is exclusive content for subscribers only.Try two months of unlimited access to The New York Review for just $1 a month.